Netflix Queue

I was just noticing an interesting phenomenon in my Netflix queue. I was moving my movie picks around and noticed that a couple of the availabilities had changed to 'long wait' and 'very long wait'. The movie with a long wait is Mississippi Burning and the one with a very long wait is All The President's Men. These have both come up recently in reference to headline news.

Edgar Ray Killen was just convicted on three manslaughter charges for the deaths of three African Americans in 1964. These killing were portrayed in Mississippi Burning.

All The President's Men is about the investigation of the break-in to the Democratic Party headquarters, otherwise known as the Watergate burglary. W. Mark Felt recently came out admitting that he was Deep Throat, the anonymous source whose middle-of-the-night rendezvous with investigative reporter Bob Woodward helped crack Watergate and ultimately led to Nixon's resignation in disgrace.

So now everybody's trying to rent these movies and it's affecting my Netflix queue. Not that I had them at the top of my list but I found it interesting that you could see the effects of these stories as people try to learn more about them through the movies. It's the reason they're in my queue.

Animals on Parade

Friday night was James's bachelor party and it has to be the best one I've ever been to. There were seventeen guys and one girl. The guys all dressed up in animal costumes and the girl as the ranger. I was a moose. We then went bar hopping around San Francisco and even had a rented trolley that took us around to the various bars. We even made one stop at the bachelorette party where I was the surprise act stripping down to the silver shorts but leaving my moose head on and then the rest of the animals paraded in. It was a very crazy night and one that will not be forgotten.

Blog Hopping

I started doing this thing with blogs occasionally. Then told my mother about it and she's gotten into it as well and sends me links to interesting entries. I decided to call it blog hopping but maybe another name already exists. Blogs hosted through Blogger.com have this link in the upper right hand corner that says Next Blog>>. My blog doesn't show it because I host it on my own site but click that link in the previous sentence and it will get you started. You come across the strangest things sometimes seeing what people choose to post about their lives, or what creative ways they decide to use a blog.

Santa Maria, CA

I grew up in Santa Maria, California, a somewhat small town on the 101 about a half hour south of San Luis Obispo. It's not so small anymore but still most people haven't heard of it. Until now. The Michael Jackson trial has put Santa Maria on the map since that's where the trial is being held. I was down there this past weekend visiting my family and happened to drive by the courthouse. Since it was the holiday Monday things were fairly dead but the signs of the fiasco were definitely there: barricades, viewing tower, TV vans, white topped shade structures.

This isn't exactly the thing that I would want to put my hometown on the map but it's the kind of thing that gets the most publicity. Santa Maria does actually have a few other things that make it fairly famous in its own way. It is the tri-tip capital of the world and home of the famous "Santa Maria style barbecue". It is also well known for its strawberries. A majority of the country's strawberries are grown in the Santa Maria Valley. I had a ton while I was down there and they are delicious.